Another resurrected review (and again about a resurrection…hmm…)
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In which a Romanian vampire in London is accidentally brought back to life during the Blitz, and initiates a campaign of revenge against the people who staked him in the first place.
Along the way he shows an astonishing disregard for the usual weapons against vampirism – mostly – and learns a valuable lesson about not hurting a werewolf’s feelings.
(So now you guys know what I was working on in December, before it all went ‘orribly wrong. And I can get back to working on what I thought I would be starting the year with.
Not that I’m altogether sorry for an excuse to put that off a bit…)
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Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!
#1 by Jen S 1.0 on January 4, 2015 - 7:09 pm
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Yay, Lyz review!
If you’re interested in vampires in the Blitz, check out the Connie Willis short story collection Impossible Things. The story “Jack” is wonderfully written and quite moving.
#2 by ronald on January 4, 2015 - 11:47 pm
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Good review, as ever, but I must admit, I’m frequently bemused by the kind of things you and some other film reviewers get hung up on.
Maybe (in this particular movie universe) vampires are only affected by crosses that are “strengthened” by the proximity of someone who *believes* in their power. Andreas HOLDS a cross. Lady Jane puts a cross into place and, well, FOCUSES on it, depends on it to protect her.
How many cemeteries in predominantly Christian countries DON’T contain crosses? But most of them were put into place by people who are long dead and might not have believed in their power to begin with. They’re not “in use,” they’re just standing there.
If gravestone crosses could affect a vampire, how would vampires rise from their graves (most of which would, I presume, be in cemeteries) to begin with? Even the crosses in churches usually weren’t put there within the past ten minutes or so; no one’s focusing on them.
Now, see, how hard was that? 😉
That said, if the filmmakers had expected anyone to care about that detail, they could have easily remedied the supposed discrepancy by having Andreas and Lady Jane use *crucifixes*, not crosses. As some readers may not know, a crucifix is a cross with the figure of Jesus on it; that could make a difference. But, seriously, back then, just having a vampire and a werewolf in the same movie constituted some serious outside-of-the-box thinking in itself.
#3 by Richard on January 6, 2015 - 9:44 am
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In a similar overthinking it vein, writer Peter Watts has come up with a workable explanation for vampirism for his novel “Blindsight”. He posits that the thing about crosses is due to some bad neural circuitry:
“…a cross-wiring of normally-distinct receptor arrays in the visual cortex, resulting in grand mal-like feedback seizures whenever the arrays processing vertical and horizontal stimuli fired simultaneously across a sufficiently large arc of the visual field.” (from the endnotes to the novel)
So when a vampire sees a sufficiently large cross, with little or no other visual stimuli to dampen the effect, they have a seizure…
#4 by Ken on January 6, 2015 - 10:14 pm
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The latest Charles Stross Laundry novel, The Rhesus Chart, also has an explanation for vampirism, and it manages to be more horrifying than any of the others I’ve seen.
#5 by JASON FARRELL on January 5, 2015 - 11:27 am
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Ouch…I also recently watched this but must have missed that Tesla was claiming to have retroactively caused the Professor’s death…now, much like Tesla, Lyz
has retroactivly cursed a movie I thought held up pretty well..
It would have been so simple to just intercut a scene while
Tesla was revivifying to show Saunders plane going into trouble and crashing…it still wouldn’t have made sense and Tesla’s powers would still be pretty transitory, but now that part really bugs me.
#6 by James Lee on January 5, 2015 - 7:22 pm
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I’ve always loved this one, even for its (ahem) howlers.
Notice that Lady Jane has seen Tesla in his crypt in the 1918 scenes, but fails to recognise him in the 1940s (unless he aged in the meantime?)
Later, Lady Jane expresses astonishment that the real Dr. Bruckner is 62 and Lugosi was what, 60-61 when this was made. Bet he had a chucke over that bit. Mind you, Lady Jane looked a tad youthful to have a fully grown deep based son – and ammusingly, she looks older in the prologue!
Sir Frederick must be the most subborn guy in the movies. Even with faced with the account of a respected Oxford prof, the determinded insistence and evidence from a lady he obviously holds in high esteem for her achievements in medicine and aiding the War Effort, an eyewitness report from his own men, the forensic evidence, Andreas’ paws and the fact that he shoots the Wolf Man point blank – HE STILL DOESN’T BELIEVE!
Nina is hot!
#7 by Alaric on January 5, 2015 - 10:57 pm
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Always happy to see one of your old reviews come back from the dead! Do you chortle maniacally and shout “It’s alive! Alive!” when you bring them back?
#8 by Count Otto Black on January 7, 2015 - 4:49 pm
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Ignoring the bizarre nit-picking about whether Count Tesla ought to be cringing every time he encounters two perpendicular lines (if so, you’d think window-frames would be a pretty effective defense against vampires), it’s more interesting to note that this film was written as a direct sequel to “Dracula”, but due to copyright issues they couldn’t use the name.
It’s also one of only three films in which Bela Lugosi played a genuine supernatural vampire, as opposed to a mad scientist who for sci-fi reasons probably involving a radioactive meteorite ends up having to drink blood, an apparent vampire who’s faking it for some nefarious purpose, or whatever. And that’s including “Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein”.
PS – Any chance of this reviewer giving us a blow-by-blow analysis of why “Green Lantern” isn’t 100% scientifically accurate?
#9 by James Lee on January 9, 2015 - 12:40 am
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I think it had to be a crucifix, not a cross, to repel vampires.
I think Columbia were hoping they could get away with doing a Dracula, as the novel was not copyrighted in the US. Hence why there are two 50’s Dracula films, The Return of Dracula and Blood of Dracula, that were re-named with non-Dracula titles in the UK, where the book was still copyrighted.
#10 by El Santo on January 9, 2015 - 9:01 am
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Since the cross thing seems to be all anyone wants to talk about here:
There’s a nuance that people accusing Lyz of nitpicking seem to be missing, which is that in most other vampire movies, the crosses that repel the monsters are physically brandished at them by people. That is, they’re unmistakably part of a present and ongoing act of human will and presumably of human faith in the power of either the symbol or the deity it represents. Even if the writers never firmly establish the difference, it makes intuitive sense that a cross displayed thusly would be different from one that was just part of the scenery. Think of it as the difference between a rifle pointed at your chest and one hung up on the wall above the fireplace. But the cross that scares Armand Tesla away isn’t a weapon that Lady Jane wields at him; it’s an element of the scenery to which she draws his attention. This writer is therefore establishing that Tesla is affected by crosses that are just lying around here and there, and that’s why it jars to have him lairing in a place that’s obviously full of the things.
#11 by James Lee on January 9, 2015 - 1:59 pm
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She is psychically wielding it…OK, I’m out of ideas!
#12 by lyzard on January 11, 2015 - 7:19 pm
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Oops, sorry – been off the grid for a little while!
Fascinating discussion of vampire repelling! Yes, Santo has spelled out the conflicting point— Even by 1944 we had seen too many instances of vampires recoiling from random crosses and cross-like objects to just let it go when they don’t. If the defining point is that the cross is wielded by someone – or specifically, wielded by someone with faith – then they need to make that explicit; in this case, either in Tesla’s book or in Professor Saunders’ notes. Ground-rules, people!
(For the record, neither of the crosses are crucifixes.)
Certainly the “wiring” idea doesn’t apply here: when Nicki is being abducted Tesla is crouched next to a cross!
Thank you for the recommendation, Jen.
Jason, it’s still a nifty little movie and personally I’m happy with my own explanation of Tesla trying to make himself feel better!
The person who WILL NOT believe is one of my bugbears anyway, but Sir Frederick is just – just – AAAAACCCKKK!!!!!!!
Frieda Inescort was forty-three when she made Return Of The Vampire, which I guess was in between the two ages she was supposed to be playing. They didn’t mess with her beyond the traditional grey streaks.
Thanks, Alaric! I always enjoy a good maniacal chortle though I must admit that a sense of relief is usually the predominant reaction to a resurrection.
Good point about Lugosi, Otto. The state of Columbia’s finances probably prompted them to be discrete rather than valorous with respect to using the name “Dracula”. Universal were not exactly rational on the subject of copyright.
(Very little chance of Green Lantern, superhero stuff I rarely tackle…particularly not now you’ve suggested it isn’t 100% scientifically accurate! 🙂 )
#13 by supersonic man on January 13, 2015 - 12:46 am
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The biggest scientific inaccuracy in Green Lantern is the assertion that a douchebag asshole like Ryan Reynolds at his most obnoxious and entitled is Earth’s best and bravest defender.
#14 by Count Otto Black on January 19, 2015 - 7:34 am
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No worries, I just mentioned Green Lantern on the off-chance, since it would have been amusing to read a scientist’s take on it. I’m talking about a supposedly sci-fi – as in SCIENCE fiction – movie in which a major and incredibly clumsily established plot-point requires a super-advanced alien to give our hero (and any non-physicists in the audience) a quick refresher on the basic laws of physics, during which he states that gravity causes big things to fall faster than little things, as believed by Aristotle, and everybody else until Galileo proved otherwise in 1586. Just as well Galileo got it wrong, since this little-known fact means that our hero is still alive when the movie ends, and will no doubt return to thrill and delight us once more in the sequel. Oh, hang about…
Other hitherto unknown scientific facts revealed in this movie:
A person who can greatly exceed the speed of light just by thinking about it will be unable to achieve escape velocity from the gravitational field of the Sun.
It is possible to plot a straight line between the Earth and the Sun that passes through the Asteroid Belt.
Jet engines work in outer space.
Etc. etc. etc…
#15 by RogerBW on January 20, 2015 - 11:43 am
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“Tesla”, eh? And a metal spike? Interesting coincidence. (Of course Nikola Tesla had died in 1943, so the name was probably being bandied around.)
What a poor taste that vampire has! He could take as his undead bride the scientist / doctor / musician / resistance fighter, and instead goes for, well, what does Nicki do for the WRNS?
#16 by Count Otto Black on January 20, 2015 - 3:53 pm
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Oh, by the way, in the absence of a forum, and since this seems to be a fairly lively thread, can I suggest that somebody on the team reviews “The Great McGonagall”? This staggeringly obscure film always gets left off lists of worst/weirdest movies because technically it’s a historical drama, and people who compile such lists tend to go with the cliché genres of sci-fi, horror, fantasy, and anything overtly sleazy.
This is basically “Mrs. Brown” directed by Ed Wood, only more so. Peter Sellers plays Queen Victoria. Spike Milligan plays William McGonagall, the world’s worst poet (and, incidentally, a real person), and provides an utterly chaotic script in which out-takes are left in, scenery unworthy of a school play represents the Scottish Highlands, almost everybody plays at least 6 barely distinguishable characters, and Queen Victoria is married to Adolf Hitler.
Has to be seen to be believed – literally! I owned the book of the making of the film for about 5 years before I caught on that it really was an actual movie.